100 Best Scottish Books

Margaret Elphinstone - The Sea Road (2000)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Historical novels are not easy to get right. If they are under-researched, they don't ring true. If they are over-researched, they groan under a burden of detail that the author was delighted to discover but which may have no place in the story, or was…

Jimmy Boyle - A Sense of Freedom (1977)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

This is one of the most important books ever published about crime and punishment in Britain. A Sense of Freedom is the autobiographical account of how a boy from the Gorbals grew up in the gang culture of the 60s to become 'Scotland's Most Violent…

George Blake - The Shipbuilders (1935)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Much as shipbuilding was the industry upon which Glasgow was built, so The Shipbuilders is one of the twin pillars upon which its literary heritage is constructed. Published in 1935 - the same year as McArthur and Long's No Mean City it gives a humane…

Gordon Williams - The Siege of Trencher's Farm (1969)

1 Jan 2005

The Siege of Trencher's Farm achieved notoriety when it was adapted and released as the nasty, brutish Straw Dogs by Sam Peckinpah. The British Board of Film Censors subsequently banned the movie until 2002 because of its graphic violence and a…

Neil M Gunn - The Silver Darlings (1941)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Like Neil Miller Gunn, I’m the seventh of nine children. I know what it means to be caught between the Broons and the Waltons, part Bairn, part John Boy. Growing up, I knew Gunn was a founding figure in the Scottish Renaissance, but the only books of…

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice (1987)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

After writing favourably reviewed yet largely unnoticed novels and poetry for the best part of three decades, 55-year-old Ron Butlin has the power of Irvine Welsh's popularity muscle to thank for his recently acquired and rightful status as one of…

Robert Louis Stevenson - The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

It’s the book everybody thinks they know, but may never have actually read, the iconic Scottish story. One man downs his own slightly unconvincing chemical experiment and becomes two: the good guy and the bad guy. As the bad guy, he wallows in vices and…

Jeff Torrington - Swing Hammer Swing! (1992)

1 Jan 2005

A confession: it took me what I now regard as a wastefully long time to get around to reading Swing Hammer Swing!; wastefully because I would probably have managed to read what became my favourite Scottish novel several more times had I not been so…

Lewis Grassic Gibbon - Sunset Song (1932)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

I read Sunset Song first when I was 16 at Inverness High School. I picked it up grudgingly because it looked like a girls’ book, like we were being made to read a soppy classic; it had a line-drawing of a windswept girl on the front which had put me off…

John Buchan - The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

'He told me some queer things that explained a lot that had puzzled me; things that happened in the Balkan War, how one state suddenly came out on top, why alliances were made and broken, why certain men disappeared, and where the sinews of war came…

Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse (1927)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Virginia Woolf is not a name immediately synonymous with Scottish writing. However, her evocation of the Hebrides as a place in which 'the sea is stretched like silk across the bay' should not be denied a position on the list. Conceived at the height of…

Irvine Welsh - Trainspotting (1993)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Much imitated but never bettered, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting is my personal numero uno 20th century Scottish book. This novel is now so embedded in Scottish culture that it’s hard to remember it’s only been around for 11 years. In that time, it’s…

Janice Galloway - The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Janice Galloway’s debut novel made a considerable impact upon its publication. Winner of the MIND Book of the Year/Allen Lane Award, American Academy EM Forster Award plus a SAC book award, the novel was also shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel…

Jackie Kay - Trumpet (1998)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Scotland’s writers are a cheeky lot when it comes to sampling. Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner couldn’t move for E’d-up Face scribes wielding references to acid house. The lilting tones of folk balladry drape the narrative voice of Sunset Song. My own…

Christopher Rush - A Twelvemonth and a Day (1985)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

A Twelvemonth and a Day is a love song and lament for the vanished 'slow old tuneful times' of life in the fishing villages in the East Neuk of Fife. Rush was born in St Monans, one of the many fishing communities condemned by factory farming methods.

Michel Faber - Under the Skin (2000)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Under the Skin is utterly compelling and thought-provoking from start to finish. It begins with a woman, Isserley, driving through the Highlands on the look-out for male hitchhikers. She doesn’t want any weaklings: they’ve got to be youngish, healthy…

David Lindsay - A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

One of the greatest flights of fantasy in all of fantastic fiction, David Lindsay's debut is not only a metaphorical flight; it's also a quite literal one. Beginning with a séance in Hampstead and a journey to an observatory in north-east Scotland…

Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory (1984)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

They say that often an author's debut novel is his or her most autobiographical. Well if that's the case, heaven help Iain Banks. The Wasp Factory created a stushie amongst bamboozled literary critics who didn't know how to take this coruscating…

Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations (1776)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Margaret Thatcher, it is said, used to carry a copy of The Wealth of Nations in her handbag. It's an apocryphal story but highlights the fact that the deregulation of the 1980s was often undertaken in Adam Smith's name. Yet reading it today, 229 years…

Compton Mackenzie - Whisky Galore (1947)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Compton Mackenzie's timeless text is a triumph. Inspired by the real events of 1941, when a cargo ship ran aground in the channel between Eriskay and South Uist, Whisky Galore! is the gentle, comical story of how the booty on board became appropriated…

Jessie Kesson - The White Bird Passes (1958)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Although Kesson's novel gleans its title from Fiona MacLeod's poem 'The Valley of the White Poppies' (Fiona MacLeod being the pen name of the 19th century writer William Sharp, who is rightly associated with the most sentimentalising and kitsch excesses…

Kenneth Grahame - The Wind in the Willows (1908)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

As satirical works go, novels exporting the animal instinct have enjoyed a certain longevity, from George Orwell's Animal Farm to Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes. While more upbeat in temperament, Kenneth Grahame's cleverly imagined exposé of late…

Alexander Trocchi - Young Adam (1954)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Virtually forgotten by his death in 1984, Alexander Trocchi's Young Adam was one of the great beneficiaries of Rebel Inc's assault on the Scottish literary canon during the 90s. But it took David Mackenzie's excellent film adaptation, with Ewan McGregor…

James Kennaway - Tunes of Glory (1956)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

If James Kennaway were still alive he would be 76 and might well be considered the grand old man of Scottish fiction. Like Muriel Spark, though, he would probably live elsewhere: he disliked what he saw as the conformism and ‘inbred inferiority complex…

John Gibson Lockhart - Adam Blair (1822)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

In a society where church scandals are nothing new, it is hard to imagine the tale of a minister committing adultery causing a great uproar. But in 1822, JG Lockhart’s novel was heavily criticised for its portrayal of a widowed minister who has an…